California Has Been Warned

AENN

The voter file is broken. Stop

polishing it and rebuild it.

By Christine Bish

(Editorial illustration: The illusion of election security)

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Article One exposed California’s favorite election trick: compare the signature on a ballot envelope with a signature already stored in the same voter record, then call the match security. Article Two is not another tour of the illusion. It is the fix.

New Jersey Pulled Back the Curtain

New Jersey has admitted that its Motor Vehicle Commission system registered roughly 6,600 people who answered that they were not United States citizens. Fewer than 400 reportedly voted, although the state is still determining individual eligibility and what occurred in each case.¹

The state blames a software failure. The vendor, IDEMIA, says the transmitted files were accurate under New Jersey’s specifications and that state officials retained responsibility for validating the registrations. The Justice Department has demanded the underlying records, including voting details and mail-ballot certifications for those who cast ballots. New Jersey is resisting voluntary disclosure.²³

Fine. Open the audit logs, approval rules, exception reports and preserved records. Let the evidence decide who failed. A government should not be allowed to blame the vendor, let the vendor blame the government, and then hide the receipts from everyone else.

California should recognize the warning. Instead, it is still fighting the Justice Department over access to its statewide voter-registration list. A federal judge dismissed the government’s case, but DOJ appealed, arguing that federal law authorizes inspection of records used to administer federal elections.⁴

Pelosi’s Wrap-Up Verification

Nancy Pelosi helped lay the legal rails. She cosponsored the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, which moved voter registration into motor-vehicle agencies, and she voted for the final Help America Vote Act conference report in 2002. California later built automatic Motor Voter registration on that federal framework under Alex Padilla.⁵⁶⁷

Pelosi once explained the political tactic she called the wrap-up smear. California has produced the election-administration version. Government creates the voter record, compares a ballot envelope with the record it created, and then points to the match as proof that the voter was verified.

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Presto. The system has verified itself.

Except a signature match does not establish citizenship, lawful registration or who marked the ballot inside. The problem is not signature comparison. The problem is pretending it proves more than it does.

California Supplied Its Own Warnings

Sacramento County records in my files identified 152 voters whose registrations changed from a qualified political party to No Party Preference after DMV field-office transactions between April and December 2018. Those errors were discovered by voters who checked. California has never explained how many people did not.⁸

Then came the dog. An Orange County woman registered her dog, received ballots in the animal’s name and cast a ballot that prosecutors said was counted in the 2021 recall election. One fraudulent ballot does not prove millions. It proves the gate can fail in a way the glossy brochures insist it cannot.⁹

California says AB 60 applicants are excluded from Motor Voter. Yet official task-force minutes recorded the DMV’s statement that citizenship confirmations on REAL IDs could pose a security risk for AB 60 drivers. The minutes do not prove that AB 60 applicants were registered. They do prove that the exclusion process deserves an independent audit, not another promise that the software was designed correctly.¹⁰

California’s response to demands for tighter controls has been revealing. The Attorney General and Secretary of State sued Shasta County over Measure B, which included voter ID, severe limits on mail voting, hand counting and a separate county registration system. California may have legitimate legal objections to a county database disconnected from VoteCal, but the optics are unmistakable: Sacramento fights reforms more aggressively than it investigates the failures that created the distrust.¹¹

California voters may get the final word in November 2026. A statewide constitutional amendment requiring government identification and additional citizenship-verification reporting has qualified for the ballot. It is a beginning, not the entire repair.¹²

The Fix

California should conduct a lawful, one-time re-registration of every voter for federal elections. Preserve the existing file for investigation, but do not automatically carry every old record into the rebuilt system.

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Each eligible citizen should establish citizenship, current residence and identity with a state-issued photo ID or another reliable government record. Identification should be free, with practical assistance for seniors, disabled voters, military families, rural residents and naturalized citizens whose older records may be outdated.

After the cleanup, registration should be renewed periodically alongside a citizenship-verified state identification renewal. Address and political-party preference should be reconfirmed. An AB 60 license can authorize driving under California law, but it cannot establish citizenship and cannot serve as proof of eligibility for a federal election.

California should also end universal, unsolicited mail ballots. Legitimate absentee voting should remain available for military voters, disabled citizens, serious medical needs and voters who are genuinely unable to appear. Everyone else should vote in person with identification using a hand-marked paper ballot.

The paper ballot must remain the controlling record. Machines may assist voters and report preliminary totals, but physical ballots must be reconciled and audited before certification, not after officials are sworn in and the electronic trail has gone stale.

Finally, California should produce federal-election records for lawful federal review through secure procedures that protect sensitive personal information. Privacy is a responsibility. It is not a magic word that makes oversight disappear.

Start Over

We renew driver’s licenses, passports and professional licenses. Voter registrations should not become immortal simply because the database forgot to ask whether the information is still true.

California has spent millions building an election architecture and marketing its safeguards. It has not earned a lifetime exemption from inspection.

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The answer is not another signature card. It is a clean voter file, voter ID, paper ballots and a chain of custody the public can verify.

Pelosi’s wrap-up may be brilliant politics. It is a terrible way to run an election.

Source Notes

1. Office of New Jersey Governor, “Statement by Governor Mikie Sherrill,” July 21, 2026. Source link

2. Reuters, “Trump administration seizes on New Jersey voting error to demand noncitizen data,” July 22, 2026. Source link

3. NOTUS, “Software Vendor Denies Responsibility for New Jersey Voter-Registration Error,” July 22, 2026. Source link

4. U.S. Department of Justice, “United States v. Weber,” appellate materials, March and April 2026. Source link

5. Congress.gov, H.R. 2, National Voter Registration Act of 1993, cosponsors. Source link

6. Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives, Roll Call 462, Help America Vote Act conference report, October 10, 2002. Source link

7. California Secretary of State, California New Motor Voter Act materials, 2015. Source link

8. Sacramento County correspondence and DMV/No Party Preference complaint records retained in the author’s investigative files.

9. Los Angeles Times, “California woman registered her dog to vote, cast ballots in the pooch’s name, prosecutors say,” April 22, 2026. Source link

10. California Secretary of State, Motor Voter Task Force minutes, April 22, 2025. Source link

11. California Department of Justice, lawsuit challenging Shasta County Measure B, June 12 and June 30, 2026. Source link

12. California Secretary of State, voter identification and citizenship-verification initiative qualified for the November 2026 ballot. Source link

13. Geographic Reference

Publication note: This article distinguishes documented registration failures and disputed responsibility from unproven claims about the scale or outcome of unlawful voting. Policy recommendations